I use equery a lot, it's great, but the mesa descriptions don't help much in figuring out which to enable. gbm, opencl, openvg, osmesa, xa, xorg, xvmc... none are defaults and they all sound like good things. Should they just be left disabled unless there's a specific reason to enable them?

I use equery a lot, it's great, but the mesa descriptions don't help much in figuring out which to enable. gbm, opencl, openvg, osmesa, xa, xorg, xvmc... none are defaults and they all sound like good things. Should they just be left disabled unless there's a specific reason to enable them?

Isn't xvmc obsolete now?

Hear hear! For such a central package, there's very little user-level info *anywhere* that I can find about many of these flags, and certainly no single resource that addresses them all in one place, which I think us non-greybeards could often use. There's not even a page on the wiki for Mesa, which seems crazy.

I've just enabled a handful of additional ones (gbm, openvg, xa, xorg) just to see what if anything happens. I've always wished I could do this sort of thing with confidence.

If anyone can contribute here some *plain english* descriptions of what any of these flags do, perhaps it could be the basis of a dedicated wiki article.

One on which kernel framebuffer driver to use when various ones are available would be nice too, but one thing at a time

And sorry, but I don't know what the status of XvMC is these days, either. It's another of my "might as well leave it enabled unless something breaks" flags.